It’s not long now until advertisers will no longer be able to create or edit old Google text ads, in the old 25-35-35 formation, as all new ads created after 31st January will have to be in the new expanded format, 30-30-80. Here’s an example of what the new expanded ads look like:

If you are not yet aware of expanded ads or how to create them, there is a Google video here, all about them.

Back in August 2016, I wrote a blog post titled, Expanded text ads; my experiences so far, where I wrote, “CTR is generally higher for the expanded ads but the conversion rate remains better for the original text ads.”

This week, I’ve conducted the same research again, looking at the data from August until today, and the overall average across our accounts showed that the old text ads are still performing better than the new expanded ads. When taking an average of the accounts in our My Client Centre (MCC), the old text ads had the higher conversion rate, but also now the highest average CTR too. These differences were only by tiny margins, especially for CTR, but it showed that the overall average was favouring the old standard ads over the new expanded ones.

However, when analysing the results separately for those accounts in our MCC, I found that actually 67% saw higher CTRs for the expanded ads, but 58% saw higher conversion rates for the standard text ads. So when looking at the accounts individually, the majority of accounts still saw higher CTRs for the new expanded ads.

I also found that it was our B2B clients had higher CTRs and conversion rates for the old text ads, whereas the purely B2C clients saw higher CTRs and conversion rates for the new expanded ads. Our clients that serve both B2B and B2C saw mixed results.

Once again, I must stress that these figures are from my personal experience only, looking at a small number of client accounts, so this may not be the case across the board. Also, there were a lot more expanded ads to analyse, as there are more of them across the accounts, so it isn’t a very scientific test, just a really rough ballpark, and only the best performing text ads would still be live today.

Here are some other personal experiences that I found, showing people are getting mixed results:

So don’t forget that the 31st January is the day we say goodbye to the old text ads. We will still be able to see them in the search results, so if you have some live that you are not ready to switch off yet, they will still be able to get impressions and clicks. But if you need to make any edits to those ads, you won’t be able to, and you will not be able to create new ones.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you seen good results from the expanded ads or will you miss the old text ads? Let us know in the comments below.